Irish Examiner view: We need human backup on the digital battlefield

While fake online accounts linked to the Russian state did generate anti-government messages, engagement between the Garda Security and Intelligence Service and social media providers ensured those offerings were suspended or minimised. File picture

Just before voting started in the elections there was a small spat, easy to miss, over the suggestion that Fine Gael’s European candidates were having their Facebook pages moderated in India.

The implication was that the accounts of John Mullins, Regina Doherty, Nina Carberry, and Maria Walsh were in breach of Irish electoral law which restricts the involvement of people outside Ireland.

In particular, the Electoral Reform Act of 2022 precludes the purchase of social media ads by those outside the EU.

In the event, Fine Gael said a UK-based agency had contracted to provide analytical reports on the social media metrics of their candidates.

They had staff based outside Britain who carried out the work which was legally compliant. 

The account and ad management were exclusively managed by a digital team in Ireland. 

While it is small beer who crunches the numbers, the episode illustrates the hyper-sensitivity which attaches to online campaigning, and the fact that this will attract ever greater scrutiny, particularly as momentum increases in Europe and elsewhere to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds with all their digital nous.

Now that the dust is settling, it appears that Ireland escaped relatively lightly from malign intervention in the elections. 

While fake online accounts linked to the Russian state did generate anti-government messages, engagement between the Garda Security and Intelligence Service and social media providers ensured those offerings were suspended or minimised.

Elsewhere in the EU, the scale of threat can be seen in figures released by Cloudflare, a US giant American network management company which specialises in cybersecurity. 

DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks — in which servers of organisations are flooded with traffic — the means by which the servers of organisations are flooded with internet traffic rendering them unusable — mainly targeted government sites in operating within Belgium, France, and Germany.

Around election day in the Netherlands there were 48 hours of attacks on political sites as voters chose 31 MEPs to serve for the next five years.

Sites including Geert Wilders’ PVV and the Christian-democratic CDA were down for a time as polling took place.  The European Court of Auditors was also hit. Pro-Kremlin hackers claimed responsibility. 

At its peak, more than 73,000 requests per second were being made on the targeted servers.

As far as election security is concerned, there is reason to be grateful for Ireland’s traditional pen-and-paper system, albeit it attracts irritation and ire from those who chafe and fret over shinier technological solutions.

National Cyber Security Centre chief Richard Browne said they worked “worked heavily” with local authorities to protect electoral registers and were in regular contact with the Electoral Commission to protect polling infrastructure.

“The system is manual to a very large degree and the chain of ownership of ballot papers — from printing them to people voting on them, back through the collection of votes and counting of those ballots — is extremely transparent,” he said.

There’s a lesson here which must be learned by all the modernisers. 

It is that systems must have not only a technical resilience, but there must also be a practical — some might say old-fashioned — alternative when there is a mission-critical outcome to be achieved. 

And that is often going to involve people stepping in, and matters taking longer. In the inevitable cyber wars of the future, that could be a price worth paying.

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Revel in summer’s first Bloom

You don’t need to be well primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under the bellyband to appreciate that Sunday is Bloomsday — June 16 — is a very special one.

It’s 120 years since James Joyce’s masterwork, Ulysses, was first published and its account of the one-day odyssey around Dublin by Leopold Bloom has passed the test of successive generations. 

The programme of celebratory events — walks, readings, pork and kidney breakfasts, plays, tours of Nighttown — burgeons year-by-year and enthusiasm remains undiminished.

This year’s festivities and the arrival of school holidays usher in what is an outstanding home-grown season of leisure and pleasure. 

James Joyce, author of one of Dublin's most famous literary masterpieces 'Ulysses'. Picture: Fran Caffrey/AFP via Getty Images

With some locations showing an increasing froideur in their relationships with tourists and with environmental black flags abounding on Spanish beaches, our summer of culture is one of the very best reasons for staying in Ireland this year.

There are dozens of festivals, gigs and shows, whether your taste is rock, folk, pop, RnB, dance, rave, grunge, country, food, or literature. 

From Coldplay to Sting to Shania Twain to Pearl Jam, performers have one thing in common — they all love an Irish audience. 

Taylor Swift also arrives at the end of this month, something which would make James Joyce raise his glass, filled with his favourite prosecco and orange curacao, a cocktail, like the man, ahead of his time.

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Too little, too late on sanctions over Ukraine

As we reach day 843 of the war in Ukraine it is possible to wonder why it has taken so long to find a mechanism which turns frozen Russian state assets into loans for that beleaguered country.

Granted, there are legal complexities, but they pale against the illegal invasion mounted by Moscow on February 24, 2022. 

As it stands, this latest initiative has no chance of making any impact before 2025 at the earliest.

That Vladimir Putin has greeted it with a shrug of his shoulders can be seen in his response ahead of this weekend’s peace conference attended by envoys from more than 90 countries in Geneva. 

Russian president Vladimir Putin has demanded that Ukrainian troops leave the entire regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia and that they be declared Russian territory by international agreement.  Picture: Vyacheslav Viktorov, Roscongress Foundation via AP

For him to end hostilities, he said, Kyiv must cede more land, withdraw troops deeper inside its own country, and drop its bid to join the Nato defence alliance.

Speaking to diplomats at the Russian foreign ministry — Moscow’s representatives have not been invited to Switzerland — Putin demanded that Ukrainian troops leave the entire regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia and that they be declared Russian territory by international agreement. 

The issue, he said, was “closed” for Russia.

Another precondition is that the West drops all financial sanctions.

Despite the fact they have failed to bring the aggressors to the negotiating table, the West, led by Joe Biden and the G7 economic grouping, is to expand them further.

It is worth asking why measures making it more difficult for foreign banks to deal with Russia and actions against the “shadow fleet” which circumvents curbs on oil exports have taken more than two years to introduce. 

And why suppliers of munitions, micro-electronics, and machine tools in countries such as China, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey have continued to ply their trade.

For Ireland, this may seem a faraway problem. 

But as an influential member of the EU, prepared to demonstrate moral leadership over Palestine, we must be equally forthright about what is happening in Eastern Europe.

According to the Washington-based Brookings Institution, Russia’s invasion has highlighted a governance crisis in the EU, which it says has “become an enabler of the war”. 

It points to German car exports to Kyrgyzstan, which have risen by 5,100% since 2022.

Economist Robin Brooks says: “It is not because people in Bishkek decided that they love Mercedes. These are cars that are going to Russia. This stuff mostly doesn’t even arrive in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan is just put on the invoice.” 

Export data shows this trend in “every single European country”, he adds. 

None of this is new.

But until treasuries, exchequers, finance ministers, corporations, and democracies take serious action on the Russian economy there is but one likely outcome. 

The continuation of a dangerous war on the frontiers of Europe. 

To that extent, 2024 resembles 1938.